One of my complaints about Safari has been that I constantly got the little spinning pizza (some people call it a "beach ball" since its multi-colored) whenever a page download was slow. Once the pizza started spinning, the whole application was hung until the download finished. These was very annoying and I almost moved from Safari several times because of it. Yesterday the network connection at BYU was hosed for some reason and I couldn't even work because Safari was hung. So, I decided to find out what I could and fix the problem. I was successful. Here's what I did:

  • Deselected "Other" from the Autocompletions options in the Preferences.
  • Deleted the ~/Library/Safari/Icons directory
  • Add find $HOME/Library/Safari/Icons -type f -atime +30 -name "*.cache" -delete to my crontab to run once a day.

The Icons directory holds the favicon.ico files that Safari downloads. This last comment just clears out any that haven't been used in more than thirty days. I run it once a day.

I rather like the Other option for Autocompletion, so I'll probably turn it back on and see if it is really the culprit or not. The real problem is poor threading in at least this portion of Safari. In any event, I'm happy since I'm pizza-free, at least on my TiBook.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:21 2019.